Is this the week that white identity in Britain has emerged as a significant political force?
The conviction of Henry Nowak’s killer and the release of police bodycam footage showing the 18-year-old student’s final moments in police custody have sparked outrage from politicians and the public.
The tragic loss of Nowak’s life was dramatically compounded by the injustice that led to it. Here was an innocent young man who died as a result of an aggressor using false allegations of a racist attack – and of the police swallowing those lies, and acting on them to the extent that they ignored Nowak’s desperate cries that he had been stabbed and couldn’t breathe.
For many, the officers’ decision to immediately accept Vickrum Digwa’s version of events was grim evidence of the “two-tier” justice system that has evolved, thanks to a state obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) above all else.
Nigel Farage went as far as to say that Nowak had been “killed by DEI”, his murder acting as a “watershed moment” to confront “a two-tier culture where some groups receive greater protection than others”. “Henry’s family have responded to this in just the most extraordinarily dignified way,” Farage added. “But I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure, cold rage.”
Farage predicted that “the division will get far worse”, saying that violent protests in Southampton were “the beginning. If we get large numbers of young white males who think the police are prejudiced against them, goodness knows where we go. This has to end”.
From the Left-wing point of view, this is tantamount to instigating a race war. Sir Keir Starmer accused Farage of “exploiting this tragedy to create grievance and division”.
Even Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, accused Farage of “playing identity politics”, and behaving like a “rabble rouser”. In comments that emerged on Friday, which were made before the backlash over Nowak’s death, Badenoch warned that politicians who used political conflict to pander to particular communities risked a “civil war”.
What Farage and Badenoch appear to understand is that two distinct forces are combining to raise the political significance of white identity in Britain – anti-white discrimination, and an anxiety among conservative white voters about the country’s rapidly changing demographics.
Anti-white discrimination
Discrimination against white people in Britain has become a byproduct of woke ideology, which I define as the making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual identities. This reached a fever pitch between 2015 and the early 2020s, having been rocket-boosted in 2020 by Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, which included the toppling of statues and the overhaul of museum displays.
Today, it is encapsulated by the prioritisation of the concept of “equity” over “equality”, both in policing and elsewhere.
This became institutionalised in public and private organisations in the form of DEI policies. Instead of treating everyone equally, DEI seeks to engineer equal outcomes by favouring protected groups. It takes inspiration from the critical race theory slogan that “disparities equal discrimination”, and prefers a colour-conscious approach to a colourblind one.
But as Kaufman goes on to explain, the result or consequence is active discrimination against white people:
Instead of protecting all groups equally, DEI results in minorities, but not whites, being insulated by “hate speech” laws and corporate or university codes banning offensive speech. This also infringes on the freedom of expression of “privileged” groups, such as white people and men.
While the law and public morality still claim to treat everyone the same, the reality is that critical theories of systemic racism, sexism and gender identity have deeply penetrated Britain’s legal system, institutions, social norms and public sensitivities. Thus, sections 158 and 159 of the 2010 Equality Act permit institutions to engage in “positive action” to hire and promote members of protected groups.
The same legislation, introduced under Gordon Brown, enlarged the definition of discrimination to include radical “systemic” definitions, including so-called “indirect” forms, meaning that companies could be sued for policies which are applied in the same way for everyone, but are said to disadvantage a particular group. The Equality Act also introduced a legal duty on public bodies to not just protect against discrimination, but to promote non-discrimination and “foster good relations... between people who have a protected characteristic and those who do not”.
This served as the justification for HR professionals and lobby groups to force DEI into companies, charities, schools, the NHS and other public bodies. While the legislation mentions that steps to combat discrimination should be “proportionate”, in practice, its spirit gave a green light to activists within organisations to start calling the shots. Banding together in identity-based “affinity groups” and DEI committees, and with the assistance of politically extreme DEI consultants and lobby groups such as Stonewall, they implemented their own expansive interpretations of the Equality Act.
You can think of this as a type of "enshitification" of employment and education. As the author relates:
Woke ideology dominates the ethos of numerous institutions, including universities, schools, the BBC, the NHS, the Civil Service and a growing number of law firms. A recent study found that up to 90 per cent of staff in UK public bodies surveyed using the centre-Left More in Common’s “Hidden Tribes” questionnaire were from the “progressive activist” segment of the population, which makes up just 10 per cent of society at large. Other organisations that have fielded the same survey have been so embarrassed by the skewed results that they have destroyed the data. The prestige of progressive extremism among the highly educated, who dominate human resources and public-facing roles, means that this ideology has even penetrated the upper reaches of institutions not dominated by university graduates, such as the police and military.
And pay particular attention to this bit (bold added):
Progressive staff hire each other and form echo chambers where their sense of reality departs from social norms. Only when scandals break the surface, as with the Nowak murder, the leaked report into BBC bias or universities advertising positions where white men are prohibited from applying, does woke capture become visible to the public.
That describes how many groups infiltrate and eventually take over an institution. But it doesn't end with employment or education because it extends into politics. And in that regard, Kaufmann warns that "the woke and anti-woke divide over race is emerging as a critical divide in British politics, predicting whether someone votes for a party of the Right or of the Left."
He goes on to discuss the split between the Left and the Right on different issues, demographic anxiety as a result of the "Great Replacement" (although he does not use that term), and the importance of allowing the Right to think it is being heard in order to avoid political violence. On this point, Kaufmann writes:
In addition, research shows that far-Right violence tends to be lower when populists do well in the polls because there is an electoral outlet for their frustrations. Political violence, whether in Northern Ireland prior to the rise of Sinn Fein as a party, or in contemporary England, is greater when there is no democratic safety valve for grievances. If Reform were in power, there is a reasonable chance that the Southport riots would not have taken place. And with Farage giving voice to the views of the demonstrators, they are more likely to feel that they are being heard, and thus less likely to riot.
This should give you pause when you consider the number of "conservative" politicians that go soft after they enter office. Is their purpose to actually change anything or just act as a safety valve? Kaufmann expounds on this in his conclusion:
The dual phenomena of demographic anxiety among white voters, and the perception that the system is slanted against them, has the potential to forge a powerful electoral bloc. Concerns about rapidly changing demographics, abetted by an elite which is unwilling to listen to restrictionist voters, exacerbate the sense of injustice created by the cascading effects of woke ideology. As the white British decline in number, demographic anxiety is likely to rise, while the willingness of a self-assured majority to grant extra privileges to minorities declines. This makes it all the more imperative not to fan the flames of populist resentment by implementing woke cultural socialism in our institutions.
Criticism of DEI is not divisive – suppressing criticism is. To stand any chance of tackling this problem head-on, the cultural questions about changing society in the name of anti-racism or inclusion must be dealt with openly, not behind closed institutional doors. The ideas that equity should trump equality, and that some groups deserve special rights, run counter to what most British people believe.
Woke is not some arcane intellectual pastime – it has powerful real-world effects. It is imperative that those who believe in freedom, truth and cohesion resist its pernicious effects on the elite institutions that govern much of our lives.
In other words, he is warning the elites that they are boiling the frog too quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment